Perverted Justice initially limited itself to publicizing the names and contact information of its targets on the website. Eventually, local news crews in Portland and elsewhere began collaborating with Von Erck to set up sting operations—drawing perverts to a rented house, filming them as they approached, and using the footage to scare the shit out of parents during sweeps. It was, at best, a mediocre gimmick suitable for mid-market local news until Dateline hit on the idea that would make "To Catch a Predator" a cultural touchstone: Set up a pompous correspondent inside the house to interview the startled pervs and make them sweat. With smarmy host Chris Hansen onboard, the show takes on the classic elements of Aristotelian drama. First, viewers feel pity for the marks, who slowly come to understand before our eyes that they've just wrecked their lives; next comes fear, enhanced by creepy graphics and hard-to-prove statistics indicating that everybody on the Internet wants to molest your daughter; and finally we experience a satisfying sense of purgation as each sucker is taken violently to the ground by local police waiting outside the house.

Even by the bug-eating, race-baiting, promiscuity-celebrating standards of reality television, "To Catch a Predator" is monstrously exploitative—a Television Age Roman coliseum where freakish criminals are publicly humiliated for bloodsport and ratings. Granted, these are bad men, and it's a good thing they are being stopped, hopefully, from hurting actual children. But they can be stopped—and are stopped all the time by local police stings—without parading them across our television screens for titillated and enraged audiences to gawk at between commercial breaks.

The couple had cybersex twice. Holly repeatedly begged Raisley to masturbate in front of a webcam for her. Raisley told her about his son, his job, his role as a Boy Scout troop leader. Eventually, Raisley came clean to his wife about Holly, told her that they were in love, and declared that Holly was moving to Arkansas. After securing an apartment for the two of them to live in, he went to pick up Holly at the airport. He was carrying flowers.

Von Erck never got on the plane, but he did find someone to go to the airport at the appointed time to snap a picture of a hopeful Raisley waiting for his love to arrive. Then he posted it online, along with the entire text of their chat and a threat to release a video file he claimed showed Raisley masturbating. And then this message to Perverted Justice's detractors: "[W]hen you attempt to threaten members of Perverted-Justice.com... this can happen to you. Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man. He's not in love. He has destroyed his relationship with his wife, he has denigrated her, and he has betrayed all those around him. He has no one. He has no more secrets. We at Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Kimberly Mitchell, a researcher for the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, has studied both the efficacy of Internet stings and the risks that children face online. While she says properly conducted stings by law enforcement are a useful tool, she worries that "Predator" overstates the problem. "We've talked to kids, and I think [sexual solicitations online] are something they've come to expect to happen," she says. "It's fairly common for them to see these things and experience them." In fact, according to Mitchell's research, fully two thirds of children who were solicited online last year brushed off the incident, and only four percent of children who regularly used the Internet received "distressing" solicitations. "On the one hand," Mitchell says, "it's good that people are aware. On the other hand, it's blown very far out of proportion—it's extreme. It tells you one small piece of the story. It can distort the truth and present this false fear."

But if initial reports from the unaired stings are any indication, a new series based on "Predator" wouldn't last long. One of the key elements of "Predator" segments is Chris Hansen's "and you won't believe ... " moment, when the predator turns out to be a teacher, a lawyer, a rabbi. It's a message that plays well to the upscale audience NBC caters to. These people could be your neighbors. But according to an NBC News staffer, the stings have become a victim of their own success. "What I heard was that they had a tough time of it," the staffer says. "The smarter predators have figured it out. You're not getting the rabbis, doctors, and teachers. You're getting losers."

And losers, as the former NBC News official put it, "aren't in the demo."